Tuesday, November 30, 2010

The first eBook from Buffalo Avenue Books! Click on the cover image to order through Smashwords.com!

eBook Price: $3.99 USD. 15170 words. Fiction by Paul Kupperberg and published by Buffalo Avenue Books on November 30, 2010.
Paul Kupperberg (writer/creator of the DC Comics series Arion, Lord of Atlantis) creates a new Atlantean realm in these two stories of an immortal sorcerer and his oft-reincarnated warrior lover. In “Walk Upon the Waters,” the sorcerer Thalis sails on the enchanted ship Yar with only his memories of those he has lost for companionship as he heads into the final battle for the destiny of Atlantis. Then, in “Passed Lives,” an aging peasant awakens in the middle of her ordinary life to realize she is Khana, the latest reincarnation of Thalis’ warrior lover and must leave her family and home to go off to war and find her lost love...and learn which of the two hearts beating within her she must follow.

ENTER CODE XC37T prior to checkout at Smashwords and receive a special 20% Friend-of-And-Then-I-Wrote discount! Just my way of saying thanks for being a pal!

The cover is designed by Rick Stasi.

Buffalo Avenue Books second offering, In My Shorts: Hitler's Bellhop and Other Stories, featuring half a dozen short stories, three of them previously unpublished, is coming on December 14!

Monday, November 29, 2010

I'm about to dip my toe into the warm, welcoming electron flow of ePublishing with Two Tales of Atlantis. This little e-volume features two prose short stories using some familiar territory for me: An immortal sorcerer in ancient Atlantis. If you're familiar with my DC Comics series Arion, Lord of Atlantis and squint real hard while reading them, you won't be disappointed, but knowledge of my sordid comic book past isn't required.

The cover was designed and executed by Kansas City's own Rick Stasi, a great friend, Roman, and countryman! As always, thanks, brother!

It will be uploaded in the next couple of days...and you guys will be the first to know when it's available.

Sunday, November 14, 2010

I was recently asked by my pal Rob Kelly, of the Aquaman Shrine and many, many other blogsites devoted to the olden days of comics, to contribute an essay to a collection he's editing based on one of those other websites, entitled Hey Kids, Comics: True Life Tales From the Spinner Rack. Hey Kids, Comics! has an admirable Mission Statement" "to share the beloved memories of discovering comics for the first, second, tenth, or hundredth time" and "anyone with a story or photos are welcome to contribute." Other contributors include Steve Englehart, Jonathan Latham, Mike Carlin, Bob Greenberger, Stephen DeStefano, J.M. DeMatteis, Steve Skeates, and a whole lot more.

Oversized, higher price-point comics had been around since almost the beginning of comics. The first comics were 64-pages for 10¢. In 1939, within a year of Superman’s debut in Action Comics #1, one of the companies that would one day become DC Comics, published the first of two officially licensed New York World’s Fair Comics, 96-page extravaganzas featuring Superman, Batman, Robin, Sandman, Slam Bradley, and Zatara, the 1939 edition selling for 25¢, the one from 1940 for 15¢. In 1944, they tried topping themselves with the 128 page, 25¢ Big All-American Comic Book (featuring everybody!).

Dell and Disney and later Whitman all played with the oversized format over the next couple of decades. Giant compilations of stories around a seasonal theme (Bugs Bunny’s Winter Fun) or genre (Western Round-Up, Walt Disney’s Silly Symphonies). I have several issues of Dell’s late-1950s A Giant Comic, each with a different theme, 96-pages for a quarter.

In 1960, DC Comics tried its hand at the giant-sized format again with two comics: Superman Annual #1 and Superman Annual #2, one published in August (to take advantage of kids on summer break from school) and the other in January (to take advantage of kids on Christmas break).

Even if they were playing fast-and-loose with the concept of “annual” by publishing two a year (a trend that continued for the next three years), these were remarkable packages, irresistible blocks of four-color excitement that any kid with even a modicum of commonsense would have to own!

I mean...eighty pages for a quarter?!

I was in love.

Remember: a kid could do a lot of damage with 25¢ in 1960.

The corner candy store offered an irresistible array of penny goodies, licorice whips, candy buttons, Bazooka, lollipops, Necco Wafers, Turkish Taffy, pretzel sticks, root beer barrels, Tootsie Rolls, wax lips, Sugar Babies, candy necklaces...enough candy to keep a five year old and his friends in a sugar-haze for days at a stretch. A slice of pizza and a Coke was twenty-five cents. The price to ride the bus or subway was 15¢, and it was still under a buck to get into most neighborhood movie theaters, while comic books were priced the same as they always had been, 10¢...albeit with thirty-two pages of content versus the original sixty-four.

The corner candy store was also the venue in which the candy-sated five year old bought his comic books. In my East New York neighborhood of Brooklyn, that was Flemmy’s, on St. Johns Place, right around the corner without having to cross a street from where we lived on Buffalo Avenue. In the opposite direction was the grand Eastern Parkway, a European-inspired boulevard designed by the same men who created New York’s Central Park and Brooklyn’s Prospect Park, and the much grander neighborhood of Crown Heights. But St. Johns Place, with its hardware and clothing stores, its Kosher-style delis and bakeries, the knishe stores, the local movie palace (the Congress, where my grandmother once sold tickets and my grandfather ran the projector, and where I saw my first movie, ‘The Three Stooges in Orbit’ with my older brother and Uncle David), was the street where we spent our time.

Flemmy’s had been on St. Johns Place forever. My father had grown up in East New York and Crown Heights and had hung out in front of the old candy store with his pals, a veritable Bowery Boys gang of guys, from his best pal Morty, to the mentally challenged ‘Crazy Eddie,’ who, almost twenty years later wound up in the same East Flatbush neighborhood my grandmother was then living in...which was also the neighborhood my friends and I made our weekly Tuesday pilgrimage to in order to buy the new comics from the four candy stores and newsstands that lined our route, none of which carried all the week’s releases from the six or seven publishers then filling the racks. By the time I was that five year old in 1960, Mr. And Mrs. Flemmenhoffer (there was also a son, a renowned neighborhood lay-about who eventually wound up as a television producer and, I believe, died young) were getting old and, Mr. Flemmy in particular, very cranky. He liked to bark out absurd and disturbing things to his kiddie customers, like “Why aren’t you working?” and “Go home and shoot your brother!” But that didn’t prevent me from going in whenever I had the cash in hand to get my fill of candy and comics, the two staples of life (sorry to say, that hasn’t changed much in the intervening fifty years).

I remember Bugs Bunny. I remember the mice and ducks in the Disney Comics, and, most of all, I remember Wonder Woman. I loved Wonder Woman when I was a kid. It was being written by Robert Kanigher and drawn by Ross Andru and Mike Esposito. The stories were filled with dragons and genies, Mer-Boys and Bird-Boys, fairy tale kingdoms everywhere, and the glorious ridiculousness of Wonder Tot and Paradise Island.

And then Superman flew into my living room.

He came through the television, as I recall, in the form of the classic 1940s Max Fleischer theatrical cartoons on a program called Terrytoon Circus, hosted by Ringmaster Claude Kirchner. Kirchner, who had spent years playing the Ringmaster character on the Chicago-based Super Circus, assisted by Mary Hartline, beginning in 1949, and been in New York since 1955, the year I was born, and his program is one of my earliest memories. The half hour Terrytoons Circus ran every weekday evening at 7 p.m. on WOR-TV, channel 9 in New York, after which was my bedtime. Kirchner was my Barney, my Power Rangers, my Transformers, and he introduced me to Superman. Whatever I saw on that show was what my five year-old imagination took to bed with me. I dreamed in black and white, of old silent Farmer Brown cartoons and the Man of Steel.

It was an easy and natural shift from the gray-toned figure on our small-screen black and white wood cabinet Philco to the blue-and-red clad one on the cover of the comic books on Flemmy’s magazine stand, the wooden rack up against one wall of the narrow store, opposite the soda fountain and counter.

Comics were, as I said, just ten cents, but only if bought new, off the newsstand. Up St. Johns Place, towards Ralph Avenue, was a secondhand bookstore owned by a man named Dave Solomon. Dave was a dumpy, egg-shaped fellow with greasy hair and thick glasses, but it was there my father had bought two-for-a-nickel coverless pulp magazines in his youth, and it was there we went for two-for-a-nickel coverless comics. (Years later, Dave was found, quite accidentally, having relocated to Church Avenue and Argyle Road in Flatbush, right near my brother’s apartment, circa 1970.) Even I, as bad in math as I remain to this day, could figure out this enabled me to read four times as many comics for the same dime!

But there was one exception to the pricing structure.

Those were the 25¢ giants. The annuals!

Continued, in Hey Kids, Comics: True Life Tales From the Spinner Rack...!

Friday, November 12, 2010

Among the many things I do to keep the wolf from the door is copy-writing and minor public relations efforts. One of the products I do said duties for is the new ICAN! 7-Inch and 10-Inch Tablet PC device that comes standard with all sorts of little features one wished the iPad had...like USB Ports, Micro-SD Card slots, an HDMI Port, and (a biggie!) Webcam 1.3...

...And the choice of either a 7-inch ($399.00) or a 10-inch model ($499.00), both fully loaded, no extras, no add-ons

Thursday, November 4, 2010

And Archie's wedding woes continue in Life With Archie: The Married Life #4: two full 24-page comic book stories (with gorgeous art by Norm Breyfogle and inkers Jos Rubinstein and Andrew Pepoy!!) in one magazine for a mere $3.99! Best bargain in comics!

And Then I Wrote...

Paul Kupperberg is

the writer of the best-selling and critically-acclaimed Life With Archie: The Married Life Magazine for Archie Comics. He is also the writer of hundreds of books, stories, comic books, and newspaper comic strips. He has written such comic book characters as Superman, Superboy, Supergirl, Vigilante, Power Girl, Aquaman, Green Lantern, Doom Patrol, Captain America, Conan, Captain Action, Archie, The Simpsons, Johnny Bravo, Scooby Doo, and dozens of others. He is the creator of the comic series ArionLord of Atlantis, Checkmate, and Takion, has written on-line web animation, the syndicated Superman and Tom & Jerry newspaper strips, the feature "Trash" for England’s 2000 A.D. magazine, humor and parody for Marvel’s Crazy Magazine and Weekly World News, stories featuring Star Trek, Dr. Who, the Phantom, Batman and the Green Hornet, as well as stories for various fantasy and horror anthologies, more than a dozen young adult non-fiction books on subjects ranging from history and science to biography and pop culture, the Spider-Man novels Crime Campaign and Murdermoon for Pocket Books, the young adult novel Wishbone: The Sirian Conspiracy (with Michael Jan Friedman), the humor book Jew-Jitsu: The Hebrew Hands of Fury, the novel JSA: Ragnarok, and storybooks featuring Superman, Batman and Wonder Woman for Stone Arch Books. Paul has also been an Editor for DC Comics, Executive Editor of Weekly World News and Senior Editor of World Wrestling Entertainment’s WWE Kids Magazine.

I didn't write it but i AM be writing the sequel, LIFE WITH ARCHIE: THE MARRIED LIFE

Disclaimer and Dat

The opinions expressed here are those of the author, who is solely responsible for this blog's editorial content. They do not reflect the views of any publication or production to which the writer has contributed nor any corporation by which he may have been employed.